This afternoon I was shooting the shit with a friend, swapping stories, and he related one of the better bar-gig tales I’ve ever heard:

In the early ’80s he was playing in a country band in Tucson, and they had a regular weekend job playing in a bar out in Avra Valley (west of the Tucson Mountains, and at the time still very much a part of the wild west). The clientele consisted of shitkickers and bikers, who of course didn’t mix.

As one would expect — what with the cost of a new Harley running to close to $30,000 — the bikers were a lot better off than the cowboys, and a lot of them held well paying jobs; their head honcho, for instance, owned a wrecking yard.

Anyway, there was a regular, a local who worked as a postman, who was enough of an alkie that he’d sometimes stop at the bar in his mail truck for a beer or two after completing his route before returning to the station.

That wasn’t so bad, but on weekends he’d drive his Cadillac to the bar, get tanked, and turn into all hands, harassing the waitresses.

This didn’t apparently didn’t sit well with at least some of the bikers, who didn’t like the guy anyway, but rather than resolve the situation in the normal manner (violence), they decided to teach the asshole a profitable (for them), expensive (for him) lesson.

One Saturday night, after the gig ended, my pal was packing up his drum kit, when he and the rest of the guys in the band heard a blood-curdling scream from outside. They ran out and found the drunk postman yelling his head off.

When he went out the door to weave his way home in his Cadillac, all he found was a chassis. What was left of the car was up on blocks, the wheels gone, as were the windshield, hood, doors, and rear window.

The bikers had done this with people going into and out of the bar all night. Evidently, people disliked the jerk sufficiently that they ignored the dismantling of the vehicle or were afraid of the bikers, or both. In either case, the bikers had taken a good hour or two to dismantle the car in public view — okay, in an unlit dirt parking lot — and no one reported them.

This incident likely cost the asshole a good two or three grand and likely netted the bikers at least several hundred bucks through sales of the parts at the wrecking yard.

Six years into his presidency, after betraying the people who elected him time after time, in almost every particular, Barack Obama has finally done something right: he’s called for police to wear body cameras.

This would go a long way toward reducing crimes (committed by the cops). I’ve talked about police terrorism, violence, and crime in previous posts, and the brutality yours truly and my friends and neighbors have been subjected to. So, for once, bravo Obama–too bad it only took you six years to propose this. Let’s see if action follows. As Hillary Clinton–who I despise as much as I despise Obama–said, “he gives a great speech”; again, we’ll see if action follows.

I’m sitting here listening to “Democracy Now,” and they’re talking only about “communities of color.” Yes, the police fuck over black and brown people more than they do white people. No argument there. But here in Tucson’s Keeling ‘hood, which The Arizona Daily Star calls a “hardscrabble neighborhood,” damn near everybody hates the cops, including the white folks. (My white friends in the neighborhood are all bikers, and the police screw with them mercilessly.) Damn near everybody here looks upon the cops as an occupying army, who can (and do) get away with murder.